toms of a sect, but to general precepts for human
conduct--humility, meekness, charity, and so forth.

At the same time it is clear that if the Essenes in general conformed to
some of the principles laid down by Christ, certain of their doctrines
were completely at variance with those of Christ and of primitive
Christians, in particular their custom of praying to the rising sun and
their disbelief in the resurrection of the body.[100] St. Paul denounces
asceticism, the cardinal doctrine of the Essenes, in unmeasured terms,
warning the brethren that "in the latter times some shall depart from
the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils, ...
forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God
hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and
know the truth. For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be
refused, if it be received with thanksgiving ... If thou put the
brethren in remembrance of these things, thou shalt be a good minister
of Jesus Christ."

This would suggest that certain Essenean ideas had crept into Christian
communities and were regarded by those who remembered Christ's true
teaching as a dangerous perversion.

The Essenes were therefore not Christians, but a secret society,
practising four degrees of initiation, and bound by terrible oaths not
to divulge the sacred mysteries confided to them. And what were those
mysteries but those of the Jewish secret tradition which we now know as
the Cabala? Dr. Ginsburg throws an important light on Essenism when, in
one passage alone, he refers to the obligation of the Essenes "not to
divulge the secret doctrines to anyone, ... carefully to preserve the
books belonging to their sect and the names of the angels or the
mysteries connected with the Tetragrammaton and the other names of God
and the angels, comprised in the theosophy as well as with the cosmogony
which also played so important a part among the Jewish mystics and the
Kabbalists."[101] The truth is clearly that the Essenes were Cabalists,
though doubtless Cabalists of a superior kind. The Cabal they possessed
very possibly descended from pre-Christian times and had remained
uncontaminated by the anti-Christian strain introduced into it by the
Rabbis after the death of Christ.[102]

The Essenes are of importance to the subject of this book as the first
of the secret societies from which a direct line of tradition can be
traced up to th